Apprising Ministries last talked about Rob Bell, former rock star icon of the Emerging Church, in pieces such as Rob Bell Affirms Gay “Christians” & Brian McLaren Is Really Happy and Influence Of Richard Rohr On Rob Bell And His Love Wins Mythology.

You’ve seen that since departing Mars Hill Bible Church Bell has been coming out of the closet as the full blown pro-homosexual progressive neo-liberal I told you he was. A source close to Bell himself tells me that he was likely even getting set to perform same-sex marriages at MHBC.

Well now it seems there’s some further vindication for me concerning what I’ve told you all along about this apostate. In ‘Love Wins’ raised hell for Rob Bell at Mars Hill, The New Yorker says G-Rap’s Matt Vande Bunte tells us:

Fallout from Rob Bell’s bestselling “Love Wins” book pushed him to leave the West Michigan megachurch he founded, according to The New Yorker. And the television show Bell went to work on in California has stalled, Kelefa Sanneh writes in the magazine’s Nov. 26 issue.

In a profile of Bell called “The Hell-Raiser,” Sanneh chronicles the former Mars Hill Bible Church pastor’s personal “search for a more forgiving faith,” and concludes that he might fit better on the beaches of southern California than in a West Michigan pulpit.

The article states that Bell’s controversial book about the existence of hell “put pressure on the people around Bell, who found themselves having to defend statements they might never have heard, let alone approved.” It quotes Bell’s wife, Kristen, saying that she stayed away from Mars Hill some weeks after the book was published because she was exhausted by stories about former members criticizing her husband’s writing.

“There was a cost,” Kristen Bell said. “And part of the cost was, we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing at Mars Hill.”

Sanneh reports that Bell and “Lost” producer Carlton Cuse failed to get approval for a pilot of “Stronger,” a spiritual drama to which ABC bought the rights. Instead, Bell and Cuse are teaming on “a faith-inflected talk show,” and Bell’s doing a lot of surfing.

You can find an abstract of the article here. A subscription to The New Yorker is needed to access the full article. (source)

It seems Rob Bell may have miscalculated just how far he’d led his flock into his emerging apostasy. Vande Bunte’s goes on to share a few “snippets” from The New Yorker piece; such as:

From his come-to-Jesus moment at age 10 to his writing of “Love Wins,” Bell is portrayed as evolving from a theological conservative to an ambiguous evangelical pastor who let worshippers “think that he was however evangelical they wanted him to be,” to a heretic worthy of scorn from orthodox churchmen.

In the historical context of a broader Christian dialogue about hell, Sanneh describes the development of Bell’s theology as emphasizing one side of an evangelical equation that conceives God “as both an intimate companion and a wrathful judge.”“Forced to choose between his personal Jesus and his perfect Bible, he chose Jesus, and set out to reexamine the store he thought he knew,” Sanneh writes

Sanneh quotes one of Bell’s mentors, Calvary Church pastor emeritus Ed Dobson, in a way that evokes the Jedi-Padawan relationship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and foreshadows Bell’s alleged fall from evangelical grace:“Not all of the elders felt like I did – some of them were concerned that he was inexperienced,” Dobson recalled about the start of Bell’s ministry in Grand Rapids.

“But I told them, ‘Look, he can communicate. He really doesn’t know the Bible, but, if we can add the Bible to his communication skills, we’ll have a winner.’” (source)

You can read Vande Bunte’s article in its entirety here.

Further reading

• ROB BELL AND POSTMODERN NEO-LIBERALISM
• ROB BELL COMES OUT GAY AFFIRMING
• STRAIGHTENING OUT MICKEY MAUDLIN’S LESSONS FROM PUBLISHING ROB BELL’S “LOVE WINS”